Secrets of Creativity : What Neuroscience, the Arts, and Our Minds Reveal

Secrets of Creativity: What Neuroscience, the Arts, and Our Minds Reveal draws on insights from leading neuroscientists and scholars in the humanities and the arts to probe creativity in its many contexts, in the everyday mind, the exceptional mind, the scientific mind, the artistic mind, and the pathological mind. Components of creativity are specified with respect to types of memory, forms of intelligence, modes of experience, and kinds of emotion. Authors in this volume take on the challenge of showing how creativity can be characterized behaviorally, cognitively, and neurophysiologically. The complementary perspectives of the authors add to the richness of these findings. Neuroscientists describe the functioning of the brain and its circuitry in creative acts of scientific discovery or aesthetic production. Humanists from the fields of literature, art, and music give analyses of creativity in major literary works, musical compositions, and works of visual art. Cover Secrets of Creativity Copyright Contents Color Plates Introduction: The Twists and Turns of Creativity: ​An Overview from Neuroscience and the Arts PART I. THEORIES OF CREATIVITY 1. Artistic Creativity: A Neuronal Hypothesis 2. Fluid Intelligence, Working Memory, and Creativity: A Componential View 3. The Psychology of Creativity 4. Clues to Human Creativity: From Neurons to Computation PART II. CREATIVITY AND THE BRAIN 5. Creativity and the Brain’s Default Mode Network 6. Creativity of the Dream and Sleep State 7. Creativity: Lessons from Disease, Drugs, and Neuroimaging 8. Using Neuroscience to Image the Creative Brain PART III. MECHANISMS OF CREATIVITY 9. Memory Linking and Creativity: Underlying Molecular, Cellular, and Circuit Mechanisms 10. Emotional Foundations of Creativity: The Brain’s SEEKING System 11. Creativity and the Self-​Made Worldview PART IV. LITERARY CREATIVITY IN CONTEXT 12. Henry James and the Creative Process: The Stewpot of the Imagination 13. Contrasting Modes of Creativity: Artist Counterparts in Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Nabokov 14. Twentieth-​Century Pathological Writers and Their Creativity: Joyce, Woolf, and D. H. Lawrence 15. Conceptual Blending and Genre Invention from Chrétien de Troyes to Cervantes and Shakespeare PART V. AESTHETICS AND CREATIVITY 16. Creativity in Modernist Literary Writers: Acts of Mental Transformation 17. Significant Form and Aesthetic Emotion: Bloomsbury Theorizes Modern Art’s “Mysterious Laws” of Creativity 18. The Distinctive Creativity of Leonardo and Michelangelo: A Perspective from Neuroarthistory 19. The Musical Imagination: Mystery and Method in Musical Composition PART VI. CREATIVITY AND THECONTEMPORARY NOVELIST 20. An Interview with Richard Powers Acknowledgments About the Authors Index